Poison Flowers Read online

  It was easy to distinguish the chairman of the board, one of the senior Civil Service Commissioners. His fine-boned face suggested enough intelligence to give Willow some hope of sensible decisions. She went up to introduce herself to him. He shook her hand firmly.

  ‘William Westover,’ he said. ‘And this is Mrs Culmstock, headmistress of St Cecilia’s Kensington, Jonathan Silverthorne of ABX International, and Michael Rodenhurst of the Department of Prisons and Rehabilitation.’

  ‘Aha,’ said Willow, identifying him immediately, ‘the psychiatrist.’

  ‘That’s me,’ he said, cheerfully, and then added in answer to a small stiffness in her voice: ‘Don’t tell me that in common with a vast proportion of our colleagues you disapprove of psychiatry and think that it is wholly misconceived as an academic discipline.’

  ‘Something like that,’ said Willow, smiling slightly and thinking that he must be as bored by the prospect of the next three days as she was if he plunged so quickly into such friendly badinage. She decided to prolong it. ‘But I’m quite good at keeping my ideas to myself, so you need not be afraid of arguments about such things. Besides, since DPR was hived off from the Home Office after the riots, I think you’ve all been doing a good job, which will no doubt outweigh my unfair prejudices.’

  ‘That’s a relief,’ he said, and she was not too entrenched in her Civil Service character to wonder whether he were deliberately trying to provoke her. ‘I can see that you would be very good at suppressing your feelings – and indeed your anger.’

  ‘If you …’ she began furiously and then belatedly remembered the gleam in his grey eyes. ‘If you are going to tell me that I need to find my anger in order to become a whole person,’ she went on much more moderately, ‘then we will fall out.’

  ‘I promise not to do that,’ he said. The gleam in his eyes brightened.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said the chairman. ‘I think we should begin.’ He led the way to the large round table and sat down. There was a blotter, a glass water carafe and tumbler in front of each place, together with a folder.

  Opening the one in her place, Willow began to read the lists of the candidates’backgrounds and achievements, together with the results of their earlier tests and interviews. By the time she had finished she was fairly certain which of the candidates she would be prepared to fight for, and she was absolutely certain that the others had decided too. Only an outstandingly frightful or impressive performance could change those first assessments.

  The commissioner began the day’s proceedings with a little speech in which he explained that they were there to select candidates who would be leaders of the service over the next twenty or thirty years, people of intelligence, obviously, but also of professionalism, steadiness and above all loyalty. The service needed people who could faithfully carry out the polities of whichever political party was in power, whether or not they personally thought the policies correct. Willow had heard it all before and let her attention wander. She vaguely heard the commissioner pay tribute to the headmistress’s long experience of judging the potential of her pupils and the industrialist’s knowledge of modern management techniques and talents. Her own encomium and the psychiatrist’s were short but fair, and Willow acknowledged hers with a tight smile.

  The first candidate was summoned, questioned and quickly dismissed. Her departure was followed by an admiring chorus from the entire board, all alike impressed by her mixture of brains, culture, good record and admirably expressed views on the future of the civilised world. Only Willow voiced a small objection, that it was hard to see why such a paragon should want to join the service. Her caveat was dismissed and the second candidate summoned.

  He proved to be a young man who had done well in one of the northern offices of Willow’s department as a Senior Executive Officer. She had been impressed by the account of his achievements in his home town and thought he would make a good administrative officer at the DOAP tower, but as soon as she heard his unconfident voice and saw the damp marks his hands left on the glossy table she knew that she would have trouble persuading the rest of the board.

  While they were asking their questions and apparently trying to increase the poor man’s nervousness, Willow started to concentrate on the questions she would ask when the chairman had finished his. She made notes of the candidate’s answers to the other selectors’ questions and jotted down her immediate impressions so that she would have plenty of ammunition in any conflict that followed. When the frightened man had been sent out of the room, Willow listened with interest to the other selectors’views.

  They were fairly evenly divided between those who liked his brains and good academic record and those who found his presentation of himself lacking in confidence and his voice too ‘regional’for their taste.

  The argument went backwards and forwards, with Willow several times wanting to tell the representatives of ‘the great and the good’ on the panel that their expectations of the candidates were too high, until the selectors were freed for lunch.

  In the dining room Willow was gratified to see that she was to be seated beside the psychiatrist, partly because he had been the only other member of the panel unequivocally in favour of the nervous man from Manchester, but also because she thought he might be useful to her. Having tasted her soup, she turned to him.

  ‘I hardly remember anything of my Fiske. Do you?’ she asked.

  ‘Virtually nothing,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘but the mind does tend to blank out particularly stressful memories.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure it does,’ said Willow, sounding as though she did not believe it. Then she corrected herself. ‘Sorry, that was probably a Pavlovian reaction of mine to that wretched word “stress”. It’s so fashionable. I sometimes think that if one broke a leg there would be people around to say that it was stress that had cracked the bones.’

  ‘I doubt if it was a Pavlovian reaction,’ he answered, but there was a smile in his eyes.

  ‘Never mind. I wanted to ask you about something I read recently.

  It’s this new discipline called “Psychological Offender Profiling”. Have you come across it?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Well developed in the States; not used so much over here yet. The police do tend towards conservatism in such things.’

  ‘I’m sure they do,’ answered Willow. ‘But how can I find out about it? It sounds thoroughly interesting.’

  ‘There have been one or two papers in the journals recently, but not an enormous number of books. Why are you interested?’

  Finishing a mouthful of tomato soup, Willow looked speculatively at the young man. It was obvious that he might be very useful to her, if she could confide in him, but she had no way of knowing whether he would treat any confidences as privileged.

  ‘It simply struck me,’ she said when she had swallowed her mouthful, ‘that a skill like that would really justify the existence of psychiatry. If you were able to look at police notes of cases for which they had good reason to think there was a connection, and tell them what kind of person to hunt, you would be worth having. “You” in general, I mean.’

  ‘There are a great many skills psychiatrists have that are of considerable use,’ he said with more seriousness than he had shown until then, ‘but I agree about offender profiling. The difficulty is that it is still relatively new and there aren’t enough people with enough experience over here to persuade the police to use them much. And …’

  ‘Without being used by the police they can’t get the experience,’ said Willow, committing one of her besetting sins in finishing his sentence.

  ‘More or less,’ he said. ‘But…’

  Before Michael Rodenhurst could tell her what his caveat was, the soup plates were cleared away and some perfectly acceptable lamb and vegetables were handed round. When the waitress had gone, the psychiatrist’s attention was claimed by the headmistress, which left Willow to make conversation with the industrialist. There was no pudding, an
d as soon as they had all drunk their indifferent coffee the chairman began to round up his team and take them back to the interview room. On the way Willow said casually to Michael Rodenhurst:

  ‘Frustrating to be interrupted like that, isn’t it? I’ve got to go back to my office in due course, but would you like a quick drink when this is finished for the day?’

  ‘Why not?’ he answered. ‘But it will have to be quick.’

  At the end of the day’s session Willow could feel herself on the point of losing her temper with the headmistress, who seemed to have an unrealistic view of both the Ovil Service and the kind of candidate such boards could expect. Once or twice Willow caught the eye of the psychiatrist and felt a little better for the amusement she read in it. When they were at last released, he came straight over to her.

  ‘You look as though you need that drink,’ he said, ushering her towards the door.

  ‘Does it show that badly?’ asked Willow and then, in case he had misunderstood her need, added: ‘Not that I particularly want alcohol.’

  ‘Just escape,’ suggested the psychiatrist. ‘Yes I could see that. But why was it so bad?’

  ‘Because, I suppose, I dislike being contradicted by people who know less than I do about the subject under discussion,’ she said, half turning towards him. Catching a derisive gleam in his eye, she added: ‘And please don’t tell me what that betrays about my subconscious or I’ll tell you a story I heard in my youth about a psychiatrist who spent his life under a bed.’

  ‘Because he was a little potty,’ said Michael cheerfully. ‘Yes, I heard it, too. But don’t worry, I learned fairly soon in my psychiatric training that I would have no friends left if I gave rein to my impulse to tell them all how well they fitted the various mental disorders about which I was learning. There’s a peaceful pub just round here. Come on.’

  When they got inside he asked her what she would like to drink. That rather stumped Willow. It was a very long time since she had been in a pub. She hated beer, which in any case reminded her of her undergraduate days at Newcastle; she did not feel like risking the wine or sherry; and the idea of ordering mineral water seemed bizarre in that small, smoke-ridden temple to alcohol.

  ‘Cider, I think,’ she said eventually. ‘Dry cider. Half a pint, please.’

  ‘I won’t be long,’ said Michael. ‘Why not grab a table before the rush starts.’

  Willow obediently made her way to one of the round tables, pleased to see that it had been mopped recently. She picked up the heavy ash tray and put it on a different table before sitting down.

  ‘Here,’ said Michael a moment later, handing her the drink.

  ‘Thank you very much.’

  ‘Now, why do you really want to know about psychological profiling?’ he asked, before taking a gulp of his beer.

  ‘It interests me,’ she said, skating neatly over the thin ice of half-truths. ‘I just wonder how effective it would be if, say, you were presented with three or four crimes probably committed by the same person. Would you really be able to give the police a realistic description of the offender?’

  ‘We’d be able to give them suggestions as to the type of person to look for, and possibly where to look,’ he said moderately. ‘But if any of the data they’d given us were wrong – or of course if the crimes had not after all been committed by the same person – then nothing we could offer would be any use. And in any case, we could only give them pointers, not an actual identity. Why?’

  ‘Can you give me an example of how you’d set about it?’ asked Willow, drinking some cider, which she found pleasant and effective at clearing the dust and fury out of her mind and throat.

  ‘OK,’ said Michael, shrugging slightly. ‘You give me descriptions of a few crimes and I’ll explain what we’d do.’

  ‘I?’ said Willow, slightly nonplussed to be presented so quickly with the opportunity for which she had been angling. Michael laughed.

  ‘Yes, you. If I set them out, you’ll accuse me of planning them to show what we can do in the best light and mock,’ he said. ‘Come on.’

  ‘All right. What about …? I suppose it’s usually murder?’

  ‘Usually,’ said Michael.

  ‘Right: then murder by … oh, poisoning. Three unlikely victims, say: an elderly woman in the north of England; a younger one, richer, prettier, more in tune with the modern world, in the south; and a man, youngish, professional, successful, in London.’

  ‘This,’ said Michael, ‘reminds me of the beginning of The Three Hostages.’

  ‘John Buchan?’ said Willow. ‘I’ve never read it.’

  ‘Good heavens!’ exclaimed the psychiatrist, putting his large, dimpled glass tankard down on the table and turning round to face her. ‘How extraordinary! You should, you know. Apart from being an exciting thriller, it’s an instructive account of how an intelligent man-of-action of that date regarded the fossicking about in people’s minds of hypnotists and, by extension I’ve always thought, psychiatrists.’

  ‘I’ll look it up,’ said Willow drily, not intending to do any such thing. ‘But come on, tell me how you’d set about the profile.’

  ‘I’d need to know a lot more. On the surface it strikes me as unlikely that three such different crimes would be connected. Give me a reason why the police might think they were committed by the same person?’

  ‘Oh, the modus operandi,’ said Willow. ‘I suppose they’d have to have had evidence of that.’

  ‘In that case, I’d look carefully at the social position of all the victims in case there was a pattern. There’s been a study of American serial killers that suggests most are from the lower-middle and upper-working class who kill representatives of the class they consider has frustrated their ambitions in life.’

  ‘All right,’ said Willow, fishing in her briefcase for a notebook and pencil. ‘Social class. What about personal connections between the victims?’

  ‘Presumably the police have already ruled that out or they wouldn’t be coming to us. If it’s a genuine serial killer, they’re unlikely to have any personal connection. Either they would not have known him or they would have been only the slightest of acquaintances. If it’s not, then of course they will have been in some way involved with him.’

  Willow considered that. Before she could ask another question, the psychiatrist went on:

  ‘But on the face of it, with such different victims, I’d put my money on his not being the classic serial killer. They tend to wreak their vengeance on unknown people as symbols. In the circumstances I’d advise the police to search diligently for some connecting link, however tenuous or apparently absurd, and then look for a person with a grudge.’

  ‘What kind of person?’ asked Willow, thinking of her still-shadowy picture of the killer’s mind. She drained her cider and put the glass down on the table, knowing that she would have to leave soon if she were to get any work done at DOAP that evening.

  ‘Someone riddled with a mixture of vanity and inadequacy,’ he said slowly. ‘I know that a large proportion of the population suffers from that, but I think the police should look for it. Someone determined to exact vengeance, convinced of his – or her – right to it, and without the resources to gain any kind of satisfaction from other means.’

  ‘Man or woman?’ asked Willow. Her instinct, which she was determined not to trust, was that the person she was hunting was male. ‘How could you tell that?’

  ‘Difficult with something like poison,’ he said, ‘particularly with victims of both sexes. I think you’ve cheated, you know, producing such an unlikely scenario. There’s generally a sexual motive of some kind in serial killings, but none that I could imagine with the victims you’ve dreamed up for me. And with murders that need no physical strength it’s hard to say …’

  ‘I think I remember reading somewhere that poison always used to be considered “the woman’s method”,’ said Willow.

  ‘Coward’s, you mean,’ said Michael. ‘“The coward’s weapon,
poison.” Phineas Fletcher writing in 1614, when presumably causing someone else’s death was only manly if it involved some physical risk to the killer.’

  ‘There you are, you see,’ said Willow with rather depressed satisfaction, ‘“manly” is the opposite of “cowardly”, therefore coward equals woman … I must go.’

  ‘I don’t actually believe that coward equals woman,’ he said mildly. ‘Must you really go? I was rather enjoying myself and I’d hate you to disappear on such a sour note.’ Willow relented slightly.

  ‘I was enjoying myself, too,’ she said. ‘It’s just that I’ve a deskful of work back at DOAP. Good night. Thank you for the cider. It was good. See you tomorrow.’

  As she walked back to the bus stop, she decided that she had learned very little except that her determination to find a connection between the victims was correct. She did not blame the young psychiatrist for being so vague in his suggestions, because she had not been able to give him the full story. He might be genuinely useful to her if she could get Tom’s permission to enroll him in their conspiracy to discover the murderer, she thought.

  When she had eventually battled her way back to DOAP and riffled through all the work on her desk, she went quickly back to the flat, picked up her telephone and dialled Tom’s number. All she got was his answering machine.

  ‘Willow here,’ she said, trying to hide the disappointment she felt. ‘I’ve discovered someone who might help us and would like to tell him the background. May I? Ring me when you’ve time.’

  Then, thinking of the only connection she had yet discovered, she rang Richard Crescent. He, to her surprise, answered.

  ‘Richard,’ she said, sounding pleased, ‘I’m glad I’ve caught you between work and social life.’

  ‘Willow, my dear,’ he said, ‘what a surprise! All these calls during your Clapham days!’

  ‘It’s just that I wanted to ask you a question before your dinner party,’ she said, relieved to hear him sounding cheerful.

  ‘I might have known it,’ he said. ‘All right, let’s have it.’